Farming Part 3

A Shit Day

One day we were assigned to clean out the pig pens, i.e. shovel shit. It was somewhat like cleaning out a diaper from the inside. For this sort of task you can’t help but swear constantly, and every swear rings oddly literal. At first, as we raked the pig droppings on top of the pen’s earth floor, it didn’t seem too hard a job. That was before we realize it was shit all the way down. Our first pen was packed, dry waste. Our second pen was only 1/3 a thin peninsula of earth; the surrounding sea was wet and stinking. It took us 6 hours, and what we moved was the build up of 1 month.  

            To be honest though, it wasn’t that bad. It was disgusting, and I was appalled by my own smell, but it was also funny. And neither as hot nor as tedious as weeding.

On Usefulness

One thing I really liked about working on the farm was that at the end of the day it was obvious I had done something tangible and worthwhile. It also meant that I didn’t feel oblidged to talk much at meals or be entertaining, because I felt  like I had already contributed. One reason there may be less depression in developing nations is that they feel useful even if they have bad jobs. Luis teased his son that if he didn’t pass his exams he’d have to be a train driver. That’s still a lot more valueable to society than the crap jobs I’m used to seeing like telmarketing, working at McDonald’s, or being a clothing store salesperson.

I was also a fan of not having to look nice. Being on the farm and camping, clothes only mattered for function; I felt like I’d done well if I just showered or brushed my hair.

Farm Summary

The sort of tasks I did were weeding, harvesting garlic, planting beans, harvesting lima beans and peas, shucking garlic, feeding animals, raking compost, distributing compost, shoveling out a pig pen, washing dishes, deepen irrigation channels.

The plants grown on this farm included: apples onions, two types of garlic, carrots, raspberries, lettuce, zaptillos (a type of Latin American pepper), cucumber, berries, artichocke,  quinece (a type of fruit resembling a large pear), chives, oregano, sunflowers, parsley, and corn. They raised pigs, rabbits, chickens, and sheep.

Farming Part 2: Pigs

Boisenberries

We started working once we arrived. Laura assigned us neating up the boisenberries. The  twisting branches of the plants were twined around weeds, and we had to straighten them out and tie them to a frame for easier harvesting. We spent that afternoon stabbed by the thorny branches and bitten bloody by flies. (Stephanie advised me to pull the thorns out with my teeth; I never got the hang of this, but trying to bite the thorn hepled because my teeth would depress the skin around the thorn, making it easier to then grasp).

Efficiency

What impressed me about the farm was it’s efficiency. We spent 6 or more hours a day weeding (so much that I have callouses), and all the weeds went to feed the pigs, rabbits, and sheep. The animal’s waste and leftovers from our meals went into compost.

Even our own waste was used. For a bathroom, we had a sort of dry outhouse. After using the toilet, you’d dump woodshavings/sawdust down the hole to trap odors; it was bascially a litter bin for humans.The hole of the toilet emptied into a large metal bin, which Stephanie and I had to empty on our last day. It was a two person task to pull the bin out from under the outhouse and carry it over to the compost pile to dump it. (For some reason human waste always seems grosser than animal waste, though its essentially the same thing).

Pig Food

It had surprised me that pigs could eat grasses, but apparenlty, pigs will eat anything, including each other. When we first arrived we saw one small pig penned off from his fellows. This one was a pig set aside to be killed. The farmers had cut off his gentials because it would sour the meat to kill him while they were still attached. He had to be kept separate for a while because if pigs smell blood on another pig, they will eat him alive.

The genitals and testicles are removed 7 months before killing the pig (they usually kill pigs in winter so the natural cold will help preserve the meat longer). The famer either cuts the genitals off with a knife or fastens an elastic around the genitals and keep it their until they fall off within a few days. Either method sounds intensely painful. (Trying to refer to the pig I accidentally called him “el chancho castigado”, which does not mean “the castrated pig”, but rather “the punished pig”. Laura loved this term).

Escaped Pigs

Sometimes pigs would be lefted in a pen in the fields to eat the weeds and roots there and thus clear the ground for planting. This was actually a dangerous idea, because sometimes the pigs would escape. On my eleventh day at the farm, a piglet got free in the field. Everyone in the field gave chase. I ran over in time to block one path of escape and the pig wheeled around, racing, terrified. Luis was furious and threw a hefty stick at it. He missed, grabbed his stick, and finally closing in on the piglet smacked it in the back until it’s legs gave out. Then Luis kicked it. The piglet tossed it’s mouth open and screamed. Luis grabbed it roughly by the ears,  hoisted it into the air, and carried it back to the pen, where he threw it on its back. For several minutes the piglet still couldn’t stand up. It was horrifying to watch.  

For some reason, loose pigs, unlike loose lambs, are a problem. I think the fear was that it would mess up rows of plants (presumably piglets step harder than lambs), and that it would not return (pigs aren’t exactly loyal to a herd).  Yes, the pig was a threat to their livelihood, but there are other methods of recovery. I’d seen Luis carry another pig back by the arms and legs, not the ears, and they catch large pigs with a collar on a rod that they hook over the pig’s head.

The relationship between a farmer and an animal is intensley disorted by the fact that the animals are meant to be eaten. Pigs are intelligent creatures, and I don’t doubt they could be trained like a dog could. Instead of trying to beat pigs into submission, it occurred to me that Luis could try to train them not to leave the pen. Then I realized that, given that the pigs will be eaten in some years anyway, it’s probably just not worth the effort. When a dog bites, humans try to understand what factors caused this (stress? illness? bad training?) and in some way negotiate with the dog, be it through a punishment-reward system or through removing the stressor. When a pig bites, they just kill it next.

Pigs are Awful

People have tried to tell me that English idioms slight pigs. No, English idioms are right on.  “Being a pig” is a perfect metaphor. Pigs who had just been fed and still had a pile of weeds next to them would try to eat their neighbors food if I placed it too close to the shared wall. Once a little pig even jumped through the gap in a wall to steal food from a bigger one, and pigs paired together to mate would fight for access to the food until one was beaten into submission. 

Farming Part 1

Before going to the station to catch our the bus to Mendoza , I dropped by the dormitories where my co-WWOOF-er to be, Stephanie, lived.  

            As one of Stephanie’s friends chatted with us about our trip, it soon became clear that we running optimisitcally and blindly to an unknown province. We did not know what sort of work we would be doing, what sort of farm it would be on (“there’s a lot to do” was the only description I knew), what the town was like or who the owners of the farm were.

            “The person I e-mailed with is a woman,” I offered.

            “At least that’s what she says.”

At this point the friend offered to loan us her knife. (We turned it down).

A bit of background:

WWOOFing is a program where anyone can volunteer to go work on an organic farm, for any amount of time from weeks to months. It cost $40 to join the WWOOF website, which then provided me with a collection of e-mails of farms who I could ask to let me work for them. This program runs throughout the world (a friend WWOOF-ed in Hawaii for a summer) and differs by farm. 

Sheep are Odd

When we arrived on the farm (after our taxi first accidentally brought us to another small organic farm), the first animal I saw was a sheep, leashed to a pole.

            “Is it female?” I asked, and they laughed at me.

Between it’s legs hung something pink and huge. I thought it was an udder, turns out it was balls. (In my defense, the balls are the size of two bannas hung together, curves pointing out, not very different in size from actual sheep udders). The male sheep, one owner of the farm told us, was kept separate from the females, and only allowed to have sex with them once a year.

Part of why I’d gone to a farm was because I wanted to fill in the gap between the packaged meat and the living animal it came from, and then decide how I felt about it morally. Trying to find some framework for judging how farm animals were treated, I kept asking about how sheep lived in the wild. There are no wild sheep, Luis, the other farm owner, insisted, they were a completely domesticated species, and had adapted to be so. For instance, sheep grow coats so thick they suffer from heat if no one shears them each summer.

            Still, something can be inferred about the animals that evolved into modern day sheep. For instance, according to the evolutionary psych books I was reading at the time (“The Moral Animal”), large balls imply a species in which femalse have sex with many males. Because they don’t monopolize any notable section of a female’s fertility time, the males instead try to overload her with semen, hoping theirs will beat out the sperm of the other males.

            A side note for those of you who think sheep make cute little “baa-ing” sounds. Most adult sheep sound as if they’re about to throw up. We had one cantakerous sheep who would stick out her tounge and bellow blehhhhh. (I would imitate the sheep all the time. This one and I got into shouting matches). Lambs, admittedly, are cute, if very very sad to watch. Every day two or three lambs would escape the sheep pen through gaps in the walls, and go frolic in the greater farm land. Then they would realize that they forgot how to get back in, and would cry. (Baby sheep make a high, mewling “mehhh”). Even when one lamb would find a way in (and there were many), his/her friends wouldn’t follow but instead would stand on the other side, bewildered. It is as if there is something fundamentally wrong with sheep language.  

Routine

The farm was owned by a husband and wife couple, Luis and Laura, who had previously worked as a kindergarten teacher, and I think, an electrician, before deciding they preferred farming. They had four children, ages 16-22, the eldest of which lived in the city while going to university. Our farm was a 40 minute walk from the town of Tunuyán, and bordered by other family farms (hence our taxi getting lost).

Stephanie and I slept in a tent we’d borrowed from her cousin (most of her family lives in Argentina) with a mat and blankets the family lent us. We soon settled into a comfortable, if not exactly thrilling, routine. Luis and Laura would wake us at 8am, and give us a breakfast of tea with bread and jam. We spent the mornings weeding, and feeding animals until 1pm or 1:30pm. Lunch was with the parents and their kids, then we’d take a siesta, because Mendoza province gets hot enough that you need to. Usually I’d read or nap until we returned to work at 5pm, and we’d keep working until it got dark, usually around 8:40pm.

A nice part was I really did feel accepted by the family. They’d joke and tease us constantly (me for my American-accented Spanish, and for getting smudged with dirt while working in the dirt) and on Thursdays after dinner we’d watch movie on TV with the family.

                                           Our part of the farm